The 1981 film, titled Priest of Love, cast the Mr. Holmes star as author D.H. Lawrence and Gardner as artist Mabel Dodge Luhan. McKellen recalls that while Gardner, then in her 50s, was quite great, her trailer on the Mexico set was not.

“At lunchtime, it was used as the toilet for all the crew. It was appalling and I said so,” he remembers. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, Ian, don’t worry.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to get better accommodations than this. Will you promise me that you will call your agent the minute you get to the hotel?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I will not. I won’t call my agent. I’m going to call Frank.’ It seems that if you’ve been married to Frank Sinatra, you don’t need an agent. Two days later, the biggest fuck-off trailer you’ve ever seen arrived.”

The anecdote had the Thursday night audience inside L.A.’s Fine Arts Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard howling with laughter — and there was plenty more of it during McKellen's "Women I've Filmed With," his second outing with the monologue retrospective he debuted at the recent Mill Valley Film Festival.